This scenario has taken place before. He does it in Quebec thinking nobody in the rest of Canada is going to hear about it. Justin Trudeau is hardly the first politician to test the waters before diving into the deep end of the pool. In this case the prime minister gave an interview to Quebec’s Le Devoir and suggested that the enthusiasm for vote reform was less now that the Liberals are in power.
Someone must have woken up the lame-duck leader of the New Democrats. Thomas Mulcair was on his feet in the House of Commons accusing the Prime Minister of going back on his promise that the 2015 election would be the last using first-past-the-post.
It has the MPs on the special commons committee on voting reform telling their friends how they wasted their summer. Mind you, as one academic suggested, if they have really been paying attention over the summer, they might now be qualified to present post-graduate university courses on democratic voting systems.
But what most academics and others eager for change could not tell the committee was how changes in voting systems will impact our political parties and how we conduct elections. We need to be very, very careful with these people so eager for change that they do not see the devastation that they can cause.
Prime Minister Trudeau has been so busy crippling the formerly strong and democratic Liberal Party of Canada to prevent revolt on a change in voting systems, you would think he was more committed. He seems to equate the leadership of the Liberal Party as similar to the task of herding cats. Liberals are much too independent in his opinion.
Trudeau’s father understood that independence of liberals and was always amused by the evidence of it. He also respected it on an intellectual level and could enjoy a laugh about it. His son has a different sense of humour.
It was the senior Trudeau who understood the failures and wrong directions of the Charlottetown Accord and told liberals in his maison du egg roll speech in October 1992 that it was alright to say ‘no.’ And they did.
It is too bad that the elder Trudeau tried to protect his sons from politics. No doubt there are many times these days that Justin Trudeau wishes he had his father’s advice on the questions he faces.
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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